72. Sarah O'Grady

A much published poet who is sometimes quietly political.

Sarah O’ Grady is based in Yorkshire with Glasgow connections. She’s interested in slow stuff and how people salvage joy from adversity. She is sometimes quietly political.
She has been published, among other presses, by Butcher’s Dog, The Madrigal, BlackBough, Hedgehog Press, Broken Spine, Rough Diamond, Green Ink & is in several Dreich poetry collections. A pamphlet was short-listed by Black Bough in 2024 and another has been shortlisted by Hedgehog Press in 2025.
Sarah can be found on Bluesky and a further selection of her published work is available at sarahowriter.com

Poems

Wasps
Lanyard
When it Came to Clearance...
Mercury Rising
Weather Warning
Hilde's Hut

Wasps

Extermination is only a breath away.
Opaque, splattered gauze for walls,
bombed for clearance
while their tiny hearts flutter
with the burn.

I watch them through glass,
the men in protective suits,
pumping poison,
see the nest knocked
from the apple tree.

High noon, we suck melons
in the shade,
drones a bare memory.
But this year our figs will fail,
just like their tiny silent hearts.


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Lanyard

I am supposed to wear it,
this talisman of power,
the necklace of fear-
inducing identity,
but snapped startled, 
I am a rabbit in the headlights.

I produce it when asked,
which is never
on the doorsteps,
but always where unbreakable
screens are called
receptions.

<<<

When it Came to Clearance…

first you bent from the waist,
only later the knees.

Crimson pearls of amaranth
scattered late summer
across autumn,
matched the defiant streaks 
in your hair.

You knew there would be
debris clustered like fool’s gold
around the roots,
all kinds of flashy promise
beneath the leather glove.

Ironmongery raged
under the hawthorn hedge,
spiteful with rust
and inter-war postponement,
waiting for a chance to pierce
even years later.


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Mercury Rising

First published online by Poetry Breakfast

I rucksacked ashes
on trains.
My father, his mother,
the first man’s grandmother,
my second man, my friend.

I attract solutions, 
orbit melancholy,
a heavy magnet
in the Etch-A-Sketch 
of grief.

I release them
onto water, earth under roses,
air to dark, stars.
Plot the ley lines of spirits,
a secret map of adieus:

that tarn, black with reflection,
ringing with curlews.
The named bench, 
loose lead tethered 
to the leg.

Everywhere
so public
I have broken the rules of decency.

Today I watch a man
scissor the sky on platform ten.
He leaps for joy,
cuts the first sun of spring
from shadow.
My entire day is held
in one gentle pocket.

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Weather Warning

First Published in Tempest by Green Ink Press

Storm Corrie lifts the keep-net
from our bacchanalian days,
releases all the saggy cans
to dance like cow bells
swung from jowls
tripping down the scree.
Our pastures still
patchy green,
we are half asleep
hearing the end of the world,
dreaming that jetsam
hurled at cars
is surely cattle
clattering in to milk.

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Hilde’s Hut

When arson lurks across the site
stealing its chance,
robin perches sentinel,
head cocked quizzical
listens to crackle
in apple tree leaves.

Magnetic fields contour
around the heat,
disturb his flight.
Robin hears his worms tunnel south.

Acrid flames pull us in,
the chilled few in vacillation
point firemen to butts,
to winter taps,
miraculously on.

Shaken we rake
larch ash, defiant
hang hinges, bolts
on the spared branches
of Hilde’s dwarf pear.
Robin waits for rain.

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